About
Maclovio Cantú IV
Born in South Bend, Indiana
Lives & works in Tyler, TX
Maclovio Cantú IV is Chicanx artist and educator from South Bend, Indiana currently residing in Corpus Christi, Texas. Maclovio earned his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Indiana University South Bend in 2015 with a concentration in printmaking, and a Masters of Fine Art with a concentration in printmaking from Texas A&M University Corpus Christi in 2021.
Maclovio works across the spectrum of printmaking as well as painting, sculpture, and quilt. He is the Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Texas at Tyler.
Research Statement
My creative research explores how ChicanX identity, memory, and cultural resilience take shape through material experimentation and storytelling. Working across printmaking, painting, quilting, mixed media, and sculptural assemblage, I draw from the lived experiences, visual languages, and community histories that formed me. My practice examines how culture is built, protected, and reimagined—particularly in working-class and migrant-rooted environments where ingenuity and adaptation are everyday acts of survival.
A guiding interest in my work is the way materials carry memory. Whether through layered color, repurposed objects, textile references, or industrial finishes, I use surfaces to trace connections between personal history and broader social forces. This approach is influenced by rasquachismo, a sensibility grounded in resourcefulness, living situations, and making do. I am drawn to materials that have lived other lives—scrap, found items, domestic fabrics—and transform them into works that honor the creativity embedded in overlooked spaces.
My earlier and continuing research investigates the aesthetics and cultural significance of ChicanX visual traditions, including lowrider and barrio culture. I explore these traditions not as nostalgic symbols but as ongoing expressions of autonomy, joy, defiance, familial bonding, and belonging. They reveal how communities develop their own modes of visibility in the face of social, economic, and political pressures. My work seeks to frame these practices as central to American art, rather than peripheral or subcultural.
Alongside this, my recent body of work examines contemporary events—policy shifts, social movements, community struggles, and the strength and pride in heritage—through metaphor and symbolic imagery. These pieces use visual cues of resistance and affirmation: thorns, broken chains, labor tools, devotional forms, and references to street vernacular. Through layered prints, stitched constructions, and hybrid surfaces, I translate present-day challenges into poetic, historically connected visual statements. These works act as chronicles of resilience, asking how communities protect themselves, assert their presence, and pass on cultural memory amid rapid change.
Across both research threads, I aim to create work that speaks to the complex and often contradictory experiences within ChicanX life—beauty and hardship, celebration and grief, structure and improvisation. I see the studio as a space where cultural and political narratives can be held with nuance, where everyday materials become agents of meaning, and where art can serve as both witness and participant in the shaping of identity.
Moving forward, I plan to expand this inquiry through community-engaged projects, collaborations with artists and local organizations, and continued experimentation with printmaking and textile processes. My goal is to build a body of work that not only honors the histories that inform it but also responds actively to the present, contributing to a broader understanding of ChicanX art within contemporary visual culture.